Late in June, a strange, quiet exhibition opened at 918 Bathurst in Toronto. MADONNA, a group show running from June 24th to July 13th, brings together ten artists working across a range of disciplines and materials. Curated by Toronto-based artist Salma Ragheb, MADONNA features work by Janie Wang, Liam Crockard, Billie Raphel, Jana Rumjanceva, Simon Petepiece, Azadeh Elmizadeh, Katie Lyle, Namah, Miguel Caba, and Ragheb herself. MADONNA invites viewers to contemplate not merely what the Madonna is but what she can become when her image is removed, degraded, or undone from its historical, figurative detail. In her exhibition statement, Ragheb identifies a “productive tension” between the regression of the theological narrative associated with losing the figure and the “contemporary twitch associated with this same absence.” If we approach the exhibition with the question, ‘How far can a figure be pared down while still delivering meaning?’ the show becomes a search for an answer then.
The exhibition’s central question of the relation between figure and meaning takes as its testing ground a symbol long-burdened with projections of longing and theological fantasy as the incarnation of refuge, repose, and Maternal Goodness. The Madonna is — as writer and artist Namah notes in the concept statement — a being whose image is “overdetermined by her experience as a sight.”
Instead, the Madonna appears here as void, suggestion, and gesture; an open slit through which we pass into a notion of the “irrevocably social ‘symbolic function’” and the “passion” of maternal reliance which French philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva identifies in her defining essay “Maternal Eroticism” (2013). In Ragheb’s own sculptural piece ark (2025), images of Mary’s drapery are printed and peeled from the surface of the paper, leaving behind ink residue. The drapery is vast and heavily suggestive of the passion and grief identified in Kristeva’s description of motherhood as a state of being, “a weaving to tear apart” in relation to the bodily death of Mary’s divinely conceived child, and the tragedy of that child being ripped from her body in the first place. Rather than depicting the Madonna’s face, Ragheb emphasizes the abstraction of her grief, letting the Virgin’s garments become soft topographies of loss. Her teatro (2025), a scene of the Annunciation — materialized by image transfer on latex, stretched on wood — removes Mary altogether, leaving only the angel Gabriel gesturing toward nothing, or rather, beckoning us to project something into the empty space.
Such an architecture of absence repeats across the exhibition, guiding it towards its compassionately negative conclusion. Janie Wang’s Habit (2025) seems to hum under the weight of its shrouded Marian figure. Wang’s sculpture, bulging all around, draped in poly-rayon, chiffon, and cheesecloth, teases the eye with a near-figuration of a Pietà only to frustrate our attempts at resolution. As one of the show’s closest approximations to a figurative Madonna, Habit grants form not to the Madonna, but rather, the historic interest in her. Wang renders maternity as a kind of sexed horror. Against the horror of the viewer’s possible hesitation to perceive a sexual being from within the modest shroud of the maternal, Wang’s sculpture denies viewers the paradoxical satisfaction of perceiving one. This projection of modesty stands against Wang’s materialization of the maternal as an eroticism in itself, one that protrudes from the mother’s body in a Kafkaesque transit from subjectivity to an animal nature. Wang presents this and refuses to resolve it. Instead, her sculpture pulsates with what Ragheb identifies as the “eroticism of being faithful to an imagined scene,” a self-negating fantasy of the Madonna’s mute passivity which she elaborates on in her exhibition statement as the Holy Virgin’s obscene, impossible awareness “somehow, in her posture and pose, of the perpetuity of her perception.”
In this way, the show performs a Kristevan inversion of sacredness. Where iconography once promised wholeness, MADONNA offers disfiguration, or rather de-figuration. At once haloed and sensually orificial motifs of circularity in Jana Rumjanceva’s Pretense at an Altar (2025), Liam Crockard’s deformed chair sculptures Untitled (All Thumbs) (2014-ongoing), and Billie Raphael’s sprawling rosary sculpture MERCY, MERCY! SAFE WORD, SAFE WORD! (2025) operate not as figurative closures but spatial metaphors opening up the iconic structure as porous and receptive, yet excessive in its own desires and active personality. Most significantly in this regard, Simon Petepiece’s Rose (2023) frames Wang’s sculpture like a halo of steel studs, drywall, and joint compound, as if opening up the Marian structures of the Byzantine and Romanesque devotional architecture to display the beauty and banal cruelty in their constructedness.
The rosary, in particular, exemplifies this distension of a devotional object. Raphael’s sculpture, a magnified imitation of a rosary made from lace, cotton, plastic and metal, theatrically confronts the private, performatively submissive, and categorically feminine ritual of prayer with sensual clarity. Raphael’s soft, oversized, linked beads lie across the gallery floor, inviting touch, contact, even play. “The referenced object is so ubiquitous,” Ragheb writes in her exhibition statement, “but its scale here evades taming and privacy.” The rosary becomes both erotic and devotional: an invitation to fondle what has traditionally been meant to be fingered in personal prayer. Viewers do not venerate it; they interact with this sacredness made tactile, perverse, and public.
Namah’s Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (2025) — a bread installation made from a 150-year-old sourdough starter, buckwheat flour, communion wafers, and butter — continues this relation of sensuality and ritual. During the exhibition’s opening, viewers tore and ate the bread upon Rumjanceva’s table-top mural, an act that blurred the line between Eucharist and consumption, desire and acting upon desire, labor and erotic appetite.
The dioramic composition of the bread installation also pays homage to the Marian cathedral, with the 150-year old sourdough as the centrepiece, moving outwards into quarters of “cracker-like” pieces inscribed with “self-containing motifs of the expansion plan of the Santa Maria del Fiore,” as Ragheb describes in her statement. The varying accessibility of the installation’s layers further suggest the differential labor and the progressive industrialization — which is to say demystification — of leavening methods associated with the production of each section. The bread, like the Madonna herself, became a commonplace medium for the transmission of nourishment through its own sublimated historical memory.
Across the exhibition, soft or delicate materials are juxtaposed against rougher, constructive materials. Ragheb’s grief frottage (2025), also indexing Mary’s Mary’s robes near her feet in different iterations of the Pietà, shows chiffon on latex marked with graphite. Both this and teatro (2025) use visceral material one may relate to scar tissue or internal membranes.
With rougher material choices, Petepiece and Katie Lyle work with intermediary, construction-based elements: drywall, grout, joint compound — materials typically hidden from view, here made final. Lyle’s Fragment 7 (An Ear in a Pond) (2024) and Fragment 6 (Hand and Glove) (2023) both host acrylic, canvas, and grout on panel. Lyle importantly situates the exhibition’s transformation of icon into impression, surface into texture, and symbol into atmosphere within a practice one may relate to rematriation at the most practical level. In a show reflecting on the Madonna, Lyle’s work invokes her de-figuration by embracing deconstructed, earthy material and the creative reappropriation of elemental mediums.
The practice of rematriation may also find relational reference in Azadeh Elmizadeh’s expressionistic painting of a landscape. In Ragheb’s statement, she frames — with reference to Nima Esmailpour’s 2025 text titled “Of Sentient Birds and Sacrificed Palms” — the landscape in Elmizadeh’s painting as a site “wherein local Iranian women engage in communal weeping to mourn the death of Siavash, a mythological figure who has become synonymous with innocence and bravery,” and women praying to ancient Persian goddess of water and fertility, Anahita, “to simulate rain.” In the formal abstractions within Lyle’s and Elmizadeh’s work, Crockard’s non-functional chairs, and Rumjanceva’s mural, any recognizable image diffuses and recrystallizes instead into a tension between origin, figurative motif, the processes of degradation and repair, and a final resting place.
Ragheb’s curatorial approach decouples practiced perceptions of the Madonna from figurative necessity. What results from this, besides an incoherent Marian figure, is an atmosphere of performativity with respect to the deployment of iconography. In line with Judith Butler’s theorization in Gender Trouble, the Madonna here — nevertheless ambiguously present because of her absence — is not a static signifier of femininity but a “parodic proliferation” of an old idea of gender and woman’s place in the cosmological order. Herein, the exhibition’s structure implicitly makes room for the lived realities of maternal eroticism while simultaneously invoking the human desire for the non-gendered, elemental mystery once projected onto the Madonna and the sexed, gendered Other. Through holding these realities in detotalized, suspended relief, MADONNA posits a discursive, coalitional approach to the commingling of the mystique projected onto woman with the transcendence reserved for man. By spoiling binary gender, the exhibition applies a broader methodology for sensuous pursuit and experience.
In response to the question regarding figure and meaning, MADONNA demonstrates an artist’s imperative to respect ambiguity in order for the art to surpass its referential limits. Limits and fixed structures, it seems, work insofar as they may outline a concept, but in seeking a total intellectual understanding of the artwork in itself, the artist may doom themselves to finitude. Here is a Madonna who “cannot be fixed in any type of monolithic representation,” as Kristeva put it in her aforementioned essay, but who flows discursively — through lace, latex, bread, grout, paint and drywall — into a space of “collective function” in which any one person could simultaneously inhabit the position of pleasure seeker and pleasure in itself.
Miguel Caba’s sculptural diptych Windows (2025) literalizes this referentially ambiguating movement. Painting pictures of their grandmother’s home in the Philippines with acrylic on curved wood, Caba distorts the surface of their grandmother’s domestic space. One side protrudes outward like a womb, and the other caves in like the soft hollow of a cradle. Domesticity becomes not a scene specific to maternal nostalgia, but a bodily sensation relevant to any viewer’s experience of memory, loss, and the safety of home. Within Caba’s domestic diptych, the viewer might become a nebular consciousness through which the pieces finally fit together.
As a whole, MADONNA achieves something exciting: not the representation of an idea, but its sensual, aesthetic, and conceptual performance. No matter how much the image changes or fades, some part of it always remains, insisting on asserting its presence. Here, MADONNA channels that tenacity away from legibility, and towards an alternative possibility. An opening. A whisper. A set of shapes and materials assembled together, leaking, sagging, and pulsing toward a mode of being.
Jonathan Divine Angubua holds a Bachelor of Arts degree with concentrations in Political Science, History, and Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. He enjoys any interesting art and is always looking for great book recommendations. As a writer and lover of fashion, he is most inspired by strangeness and beauty.